


Summoning Demons

by objectlesson



Category: AFI (Band)
Genre: Crossdressing, Frat House era, Homophobia, Internalized Homophobia, M/M, Mentions of Homophobic Violence, Witchcraft, gender essentialism, pining? Sort of, thrifting
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-18
Updated: 2020-10-18
Packaged: 2021-03-08 18:28:39
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,991
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27091279
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/objectlesson/pseuds/objectlesson
Summary: Jade feels like he’s a ghost floating around the ceiling, staring down at his own body in relation to Davey’s, regarding them as a pair. He’s paranoid and wonders what other shoppers think, how they look to strangers: two goth guys getting halloween costumes or like, one goth guy drag queen and his exasperated shopping buddy, or like. A Gay Couple. He steps back decidedly because he hates the idea of anyone thinking the latter.
Relationships: Davey Havok/Jade Puget
Comments: 12
Kudos: 5





	Summoning Demons

**Author's Note:**

> I think at this point I'm just TRYING to make 2020 as weird as fucking possible so I have some semblance of control over the amount of weirdness that's being forced on me? Anyway yeah I dug up this old corpse and threw a fistful of protective herbs on the exhumed body. I don't know why??? I definitely still hate them. But I spend a lot of time thinking about internalized homophobia, especially in October. And Also managed to like--touch their music, with an extended pinky finger, in hopes of reconciling trauma or whatever. 
> 
> For those of you who don't know (I DID orphan all my old world in this fandom) I wrote fic about these two from like?? 2003 to 2013? So, uh, ten years. Maybe more. I have very selective memory from this time because liking this band was basically like being in a cult. I orphaned it all a few years ago for a lot of reasons and it was a good decision for me. I might orphan this one, too. We'll see! In the meantime I'm posting because, like I said, 2020 is weird. 
> 
> im pretty sure NO ONE will read this but if you do, enjoy.

They’re at a Goodwill all the way in Alameda, because the first hundred thrift stores they went to didn’t have what Davey was looking for. 

Jade doesn’t know what he’s looking for, actually. Davey has yet to articulate what it is, exactly, he has in mind for his Halloween costume. He just keeps spewing the same vague shit as he wanders down aisles reaching out and touching anything and everything black: _something cool. Maybe sort of glam. Just like. Cool._

Jade follows him all over the East Bay like a shadow, half-worried this is all a trick. That Davey is testing him, seeing how many dirty thrift stores he can make him go to in how many dirty corners of the city. Except Davey isn't _making_ him do anything—Jade is tagging along willingly, quietly, dutifully. He should stop. he should be like, _Dave, m’done, I need a burrito, see you back at the house later._ But instead, he sits shotgun while Davey rips around corners without signaling. He lurches into the dashboard again and again while Davey brakes too hard every time. He walks too long through residential areas where people judge him from the porch after Davey parks miles and miles away because he refuses to pay meters. He stands in the home goods section of every thrift store in Oakland while Davey looks at little bottles and shit, which has nothing at all to do with his Halloween costume and everything to do with his burgeoning interest in summoning demons. 

Jade, it seems, can’t stop. _Why are you doing this?_ He does not ask himself, because he doesn't want to even _think_ about the answer. He just does it. Follows and follows. Stands at the altar Davey built on top of their shared dresser in their shared room. Summons demons. Holds armfuls of bottles while Davey tries on women’s clothes. Pretends he doesn't know him. _Knows_ he knows him better than he’s ever known anyone else in the whole stupid world. Knows he wants to know him even more. Jade is a mess of knowing, and doing absolutely nothing to change that. 

“Do you want to get burritos after this?” he asks when his stomach starts to growl in Alameda. He’s feeling exhausted and antsy as Davey drapes dress after dress over his own arm. The hangers are clacking together. Jade doesn't want to see him in a dress, but he’s watching the spectacle anyway, the contrast of his tattoos against the glittery black prom fabric like some awful hallucinatory daydream. He feels like he’s a ghost floating around the ceiling, staring down at his own body in relation to Davey’s, regarding them as a pair. He’s paranoid and wonders what other shoppers think, how they look to strangers: two goth guys getting halloween costumes or like, one goth guy drag queen and his exasperated shopping buddy, or like. A Gay Couple. He steps back decidedly because he hates the idea of anyone thinking the latter. 

“Yeah, sure, burrito sounds good. If I find something to wear as a costume,” Davey says idly. Then, he holds up a busty black form-fitting thing. “I could be Elvira.” 

Sometimes, Jade wishes Davey was a girl. He thinks his life would be easier and clearer and less riddled in weird Swiss-cheese holes of willful blindness if he was. But he’s not, so things like Davey dressing up as Elvira for Halloween just make Jade feel nervous, and sick, and shaky. “And if you don't find something as a costume…?” he ventures. 

“Them I think m’gonna go back to the spot we hit in Fruitvale and get that silver cape thing I tried on and be a vampire, I guess,” he says, shrugging and dropping the dress over his shoulder. “Come help me try these on,” he demands then, in the cheerful, easy way he always demands things so that they never seem like demands. Davey is an inescapable tarpit, but he’s also magically likable. He’s like a black-hole, ever sucking things in. 

Jade isn't hungry anymore. His hands are sweaty as he follows Davey into the cramped dressing room, which has blood red walls and is too small for _one_ person and a bunch of dresses, let alone two. he sits down on the tiny, grimy bench, pressed into the mirror and staring at some graffiti on the opposite wall so he doesn’t have to look at Davey, who is pulling his muscle shirt over his head easily, shamelessly. 

He tosses it in Jade’s face, and it’s still warm from his skin. It smells like his deodorant which smells like spearmint because its one of those weird natural deodorants. It also doesn't work so Jade can smell Davey’s sweat in the shirt too, and that makes him feel hot and dizzy and awful so he bats it down to the ground like it was a spider that touched him. His heart is racing. He cups his face in his hands, like he could cover up the flush, hide it from the world. 

It’s fine, because Davey isn’t looking at him. He’s looking through the hangers he brought in, all the black dresses in a row like a bunch of invisible women are attending his funeral. Then he picks one, and tries to pull it over his head. It gets stuck, his wrists pinned skyward, his shaved armpits exposed, face hidden. He could be a girl, like this, just some tattooed goth-girl who was sort of buff. Jade risks looking at him, thinking, _that’s my goth girlfriend trying on dresses for halloween because she’s a girl who wears dresses and that's normal._ The thought doesn’t help, because it's not true. Jade looks down instead, gaze burning twin holes into the shirt like an ink-stain at his feet. 

_“_ Will you pull the hem down?” Davey asks, voice muffled from the heap of silk and taffeta. 

“You can’t do it yourself?” Jade asks, even as he’s standing. A dumb little toy soldier, and ant in a line, a lemming marching off a fucking cliff. Wandering all around the East Bay while his stomach eats itself, half pretending Davey is his girlfriend so he can understand why he puts himself through this shit. 

“No, I don’t think so,” Davey says, squirming. 

Jade gets up, clenches his jaw, and tries to find a place to put his fingers that isn’t anywhere near skin. He can smell the spearmint and sweat even more, now, coupled with Davey’s hair product, which is how his own pillow smells, because Davey is a pillow-stealer and they sometimes—a lot of the time, actually—share a bed. Which, a few months ago, Jade convinced himself was normal. Jade is great at convincing himself things until it’s too late to get himself out of the tar anymore and he’s just sinking and sinking, a dinosaur about to go fucking extinct. 

He tugs the dress down inch by inch. It doesn’t really fit around Davey’s broad shoulders, so he can’t zip it up all the way. Plus, the top is gappy around his chest, because he’s not a girl, and cant fill out the boob-cups, because he doesn't have boobs. 

Jade pokes one, because he thinks it’s important if he tries to act normal, and like he’s not a dinosaur about to go fucking extinct. “It’s a few cup sizes too big.” 

Davey makes a face, turning left and right and surveying himself in the mirror. “I could stuff it with tissues or something.” 

“I don’t think tissue titties are gonna cut it for an Elvira costume,” Jade says. He’s about to suggest they just skip the dresses and go back for the vampire cape already so he can _get a burrito goddamn it_ when Davey backs his ass up into him. 

“Unzip me,” he says, curling the bangs of his devil lock around his fist. “So I can try on the rest.” 

Jade’s thumb grazes his spine and his heart fucking stops. _I think maybe we should stop sharing a bed so much. I think maybe that was actually weird all along. I think maybe you should get someone else to do your zipper stuff for you. I think maybe I need to leave. I think maybe this whole thing is getting out of hand,_ he wants to say. He even clears his throat in preparation, but swallows the words down at the last minute. Because the thing is, he doesn’t want to admit that this thing is a thing that is _thingy_ enough to get out of hand. He wants to keep pretending he’s the sort of guy so comfortable and confident in his heterosexuality he _can_ have a best friend who wears dresses and make up, and he _can_ share a room and sometimes a bed with that friend, and he _can_ follow him all over town like a pathetic dog, and it’s fine, because he’s normal. They’re not a gay couple. They’re just two goth guys getting Halloween costumes. 

Davey turns around, eyes dark, smile like a fucking seashell or a sliver of waning moon or goddamned _snow_ or something, flaming heart tattoo so terrifically bright on his chest Jade can’t stop staring at it, and he knows, he _knows_ from the way his fucking stomach drops down to the dirty ass goodwill dressing room floor that he’s not normal. That whatever they’re doing and not talking about isn't normal. That they’re _not_ to goth guys getting Halloween costumes. 

“Hand me another one?” Davey asks, licking his lower lip. Not in a sexy way or anything, in a it’s-chapped way, but Jade’s gaze still snags on the motion and he mimics it reflexively, hating himself the second it happens. He and Davey shouldn't lick their lips around each other. They shouldn’t share beds.They shouldn’t share dressing rooms. 

He grabs a dress at random and shoves it, too rough, into Davey’s hands. “Here,” he says. _It’s too hot in this stupid cramped little ass-box, I need to get some air_ he thinks, but he can’t say it aloud, because it sounds _exactly_ like what he is. He sits down again instead, woozy. “Can’t you just be a vampire?” 

“Maybe I will. Maybe I’ll get one of these dresses _and_ a cape and I’ll be like, Draula’s wife. Or something. What’re you gonna be? You could be Dracula,” he says. He does not say is casually, either, he says it with glittering eyes, his tongue pressed into his cheek as he shoots a testy look over his shoulder at Jade. He knows he _hates_ it when people think they’re together. _Why does it bother you so much?_ he asked him once while they laid side by side on his bad, shirtless, knees a whisper apart. Jade remembers he could smell Davey’s breath when he asked, their faces were that close. _Because we're not. We’re not together and we’re not gay_ is what he said. Davey didn’t say anything, he just pressed his lips together, eyes flashing, so Jade didn’t continue, though at the time he had been thinking _I don’t want them to turn_ this _into something gross._ And by _this_ he’d meant being in a band together, writing songs together, doing everything together, lying close enough to taste one another’s breath. Because that was months ago and he didn’t realize yet that it was a tarpit. He didn’t realize whatever they shared wasn’t pure or magical or brotherly, it was weird, and scary. Just like summoning demons was weird, and scary. Davey just—he always made things seem so cool, at first. It was easy to stick your toe in and wade up to your neck before you realized you were dying, with him. 

“Or you could _not_ wear girl’s clothes,” Jade offers. 

“Don’t,” Davey says, rolling his eyes and stepping into the next dress this time, instead of pulling it over his head. He wrestles it up his pale thighs, and Jade decidedly does not watch.

“Don’t what?” 

“Don’t—don’t be like that. Like those insecure douchebags who try to beat me up at shows.” 

“I’m not! You know I don’t—I don’t have a problem with _you wearing girls clothes_ , I have a problem with _those guys_ trying to shank you because of it. Who knows who’s gonna be at this Halloween Party. There could be weird skins or something,” Jade says as his cheeks burn, telling only half the truth. It freaks him out on like six levels when Davey looks too much like a woman. On the surface, it makes him confused. It makes him wish impossible things. It makes him feel better for sharing a bed with him and waking up with weird morning wood over it, because like maybe it’s a function of his heterosexuality, being fucked up over Davey. Maybe all of this is because he looks like a girl, and Jade likes girls so much. On the other hand, it _does_ mess with his head in the insecure douchebag way, too. It makes his insides knot up uncomfortably. It makes his eyes water. Part of him feels like its fundamentally _wrong,_ and fundamentally wrong for _him_ to have feelings about it. But he can’t _tell_ Davey about those layers, so he opts for the only fair explanation, which is that it just genuinely worries him. Last year some homophobes locked Davey in a dressing room and threatened him with broken beer bottles. Just last _week_ someone yelled _Fag_ from a truck and threw a paper bag full of dogs shit at them when they were skating down Mandela Parkway. It’s not like Jade is being unreasonable. 

Luckily Davey buys his concern, and cocks his head. “If anyone gives me a hard time I’ll deck them. I’m pretty sure I’d fare better in a fight than you would, anyway.” 

He’s right. Jade stops talking. This dress fits and looks annoyingly pretty, and he makes himself say so because he doesn’t want Davey thinking he's no better than the beer-bottle guys. “I dig it. Very Dracula’s wife.” 

“It’s a little long.” 

“You could wear heels,” Jade suggests. 

Davey snorts. “I’m sure you’d love that.” 

It repeats in Jade’s head on a loop as they stand in line to pay for the dress, and like most things Davey says, he can interpret it in a variety of increasingly unsettling ways. Maybe Davey was being sarcastic. Maybe he wasn’t. Maybe he knows Jade has stared at his ankles before, imagining they were a goth-girl’s ankles his goth-girlfriend could prop in his lap. Maybe he legitimately thinks Jade is a homophobe. Maybe Jade is a homophobe. He wonders if he would rather be a homophobe than gay, and wonders if it means he _is_ a homophobe that the answer is _yes._

On the way home, Davey nearly kills them pulling into a Del Taco drive through. “For your burrito,” he says. 

“I sort of wanted like, a _real_ burrito?” Jade confesses, but he buys one anyway, because he’s starving. 

He eats it sitting shotgun, until Davey pulls over and says, “Can you drive the rest of the way home? Someone—something—one of my spirit guides or the universe maybe? Is telling me i should not drive.” 

Jade is afraid of Davey’s so-called spirit guides, so he climbs behind the wheel. Davey feeds him the rest of his burrito once they’re on the highway, peeling back the grease stained paper wrapper carefully and offering it up to his lips so he can take bites. A few months ago, Jade would have been able to convince himself this wasn’t weird, but everything is raw and obvious to him now, and he _knows_ it’s weird. He doesn’t tell Davey to stop, though, until his knuckles brush his chin, and Jade jumps, the car swerving “Hey,” Davey says, wiping sauce on Jade’s shirt defiantly. “I’m trying to _help_ you.” 

“Dave. You’re shoving a burrito in my face while I drive,” Jade mumbles. “It’s distracting.” 

_I think maybe we should stop sharing a bed so much. I think maybe that was actually weird all a long. I think its possible hand feeding your friends is weird. I think maybe this whole thing is getting out of hand,_ he thinks of saying again. He tries to imagine how Davey would react—if he would laugh at him or suck in a somber inhalation and agree or maybe say an incantation or something and summon one of his spirit guides to flip the car in retaliation. Jade’s pretty sure none of that would happen, though, because he _knows_ Davey, he knows him way too well, he knows the smell of his breath and the way he twitches when he sleeps and at which point in the day his stupid hippie deodorant wears off. He’s pretty sure he’d just say _what thing?_ with his bushy eyebrow quirked up. He'd ask so many questions and pick Jade apart so effectively he’d regret ever saying anything in the first place. He’d convince him this was not just normal and ok, but _cool._ Davey always makes things seem so cool. It’s easy to stick your toe in and wade up to your neck before you realize you’re dying, with him.

Once they’re back home, Jade tries to take a nap to get away from Davey’s suffocating tar-pit existence, but it’s impossible because they share a room. Instead they lie in their respective beds talking about nothing, which never lasts for long because its awkward to be on your squeaky air mattress on the floor while your friend is on a nice normal mattress _not_ on the floor and he pats the empty space beside himself and says, “What are you doing down there?’ and you are a dumb little toy soldier, and ant in a line, a lemming marching off a fucking cliff.

Jade climbs up and falls asleep, eventually, to the smell of Davey’s breath. 


End file.
